Friday, June 02, 2006

Earlier today, my brother, Michael, posted an excellent guest commentary on the whole Barry Bonds issue...I can sit here and debate his points, and agree with most, and disagree with a few, or I can try to discuss such points as the validity of both Ted Williams and Willie Mays as better hitters (Williams) and all-around players (Mays) then Bonds...or how, if he had never taken steroids, Bonds would still have been one of the greatest all-around players of all-time, a distinction neither Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire could ever lay claim to...but the fact is, I don't know what Bud Selig and his cabal of owners knew or didn't know, and when they did or didn't know it...and prosecuting retroactively seems hypocritical, since they themselves had to know well before the government got ahold of the issue...and quite frankly, I prefer not to have to make a decision on what Bonds did, any more then I want to condemn Jim Bouton for popping "greenies" (uppers) as he admitted in his classic book, "Ball Four" (also an illegal act)...I prefer to boo Bonds for being a dominant force in the Giants line-up when he plays us, and try hard to ignore him when he's not...

Over at Metsblog, one of our favorite websites, Matt Cerone offers his own, similar opinion which you can read by clicking here. Here are a few of Matt's key points:

…i can’t prove it, but i have to imagine he used steroids, as i suspect many of his contemporaries did and do, as well…i just can’t get overly crazed about this issue, because it’s more complicated to me than just boo’ing some egomaniac from a team i don’t root for…

-and-

…to me it’s a technological issue, it’s a medical issue, there’s the influence it has on aspiring little leaguers, it’s a moral issue, there’s a legal element, it’s a union issue, it’s a big business issue, there’s the historical record issue, there’s the debate over testing and how human growth hormones cannot be detected, and there’s a contextual element using factors from each decade, like cocaine and greenies in the 80s, scuffing and spitballs in the 70s, and booze in the 50s and 60s, among other things that impacted the game……in my gut, i know what Henry Aaron accomplished is far more impressive than what bonds has done, and we all know why, and i don’t need a record book to tell me…

Finally, we lived through seeing Aaron break the immortal Babe's record, and we respected what he did and the spectacle of watching such an amazing record being broken, but Aaron handled himself with such dignity and class while being hounded by psychos and death-threats the likes of which we never will know or (hopefully) experience...and once again, Matt offers what we'd like to be our parting words on the issue:

…in my gut, i know what Henry Aaron accomplished is far more impressive than what bonds has done, and we all know why, and i don’t need a record book to tell me…i suspect bonds knows this, as well…

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